The Canadian Centre for Aging and Brain Health Innovation (CC-ABHI) announced today the launch of its Spark Program, an initiative designed to provide point-of-care workers in the healthcare delivery or service industry in North America with as much as Read the rest of this entry »

7. Thanks: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier(Houghton Mifflin, August 2007)– Prof. Robert Emmons, Professor of Psychology at UC Davis and Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Positive Psychology, writes a solid book that combines a research-based synthesis of the topic as well as practical suggestions. Interview notes here.

8. The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind(Oxford University Press, January 2001)– Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg, clinical professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine, provides a fascinating perspective on the role of the frontal roles and executive functions through the lifespan. Interview notes here.

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Back in July, I wrote a post entitled 10 Brain Tips To Teach and Learn. Those tips apply to students of any age, including adults, for ideally adults are still learners. Why is adult learning relevant in a brain-focused blog, you may wonder:

The short of it

As we age, our brain:

still forms new brain cells
can change its structure & function
finds positive stress can be beneficial; negative stress can be detrimental
can thrive on novel challenges
needs to be exercised, just like our bodies

The long of it

Adults may have a tendency to get set in their ways have been doing it this way for a long time and it works, so why change? Turns out, though, that change can be a way to keep aging brains healthy. At the April Learning & the Brain conference, the theme of which was neuroplasticity, I attended several sessions on adult learning. Here’s what the experts are saying.

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Our January Newsletter received a good deal of feedback from many readers. Based on it, our new approach is to select the top 10 most important articles every other week. Please take a look at this first experiment, and let us know you feedback.

(Also, remember that you can subscribe to receive our blog RSS feed, or to our monthly newsletter at the top of this page if you want to receive this newsletter by email).

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Here’s a fun puzzle that a friend gave me over dinner a few days ago …

How do you cut a cake into eight equal pieces with only three cuts?the cake in the puzzle is not necessarily the one pictured below

You have to use your mental rotation and mental imagery skills to visualize the answer for this puzzle. In doing so, you are using your visual cortex in the occipital lobes, your somatosensory cortex in your parietal lobes, and your executive functions in your frontal lobes to help create and evaluate your hypotheses.

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Answer: Use two cuts to cut the cake into four equal pieces. Stack the four pieces vertically, and use your third cut to cut the four pieces in half horizontally.

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About SharpBrains

As seen in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC News, CNN, Reuters, and more, SharpBrains is an independent market research firm and think tank tracking health and performance applications of brain science.